When you want to garden in a way that doesn’t fight against nature, observation is your first and most important tool. Permaculture enshrines it as one of its key principles, which are the basis upon which all of a garden designer’s decision-making rests.
Which way does water run on your property when it rains? Which spots get the most light? Do any areas get battered by the wind? Those are all basic big-picture questions that can be answered by intentionally walking around your site and paying attention through all seasons and all kinds of weather.
But there are smaller things to be learned from observation as well. Intimate details that build up day after day, season after season, until you begin to know what your land is going to do before it does it. This gives you a matchless sense of rootedness and connection, but the benefits are not only spiritual. Observation also saves you the time and energy of reacting to things after they happen. Just think about the difference in labour between preparing for or responding to a flooded creek, a damaged structure, an out-of-control weed…
I have only been living on my current property for about a month, so observation during this time has been crucial. It has also been extremely rewarding, since we moved before the snow melted and have been here to watch the forest wake up. I take ten to twenty minutes nearly every day to walk down the cleared slope where I’ve begun a garden, along the low patch of soggy ground where the runoff collects, and through part of our two-ish acres of forest. The land has revealed treasures I never expected, from berry shrubs to carpets of the wildflower called “spring beauty”. To inspire you in your own observation practice, here are fifteen useful things I have learned in my first month of looking closely.
Scavenger hunts are a great way to force close observation.
Many of my first glimpses of sprouting plants this spring came while I was hunting for forked sticks to build trellises for my garden. Having a reason to keep my eyes on the ground really focused my attention.
I need to be on alert for a flowering vine that may cause trouble.
One plant in the sunniest parts of the forest is starting to look concerningly vine-like and invasive. Because I have spent the past month watching it grow, I know that it started as little pairs of oval-shaped cotyledons (seed leaves) that carpeted most of the exposed soil. From this I can infer that it spreads vigorously by seed. If it does turn out to be a harmful invasive plant, I know already that I should watch for its flowers and remove them before it can go to seed this year.
I don’t need to prioritize making a fence around my garden.
Although deer and rabbits are common in the area, there’s no evidence of them on this property. Our scrap of forest is surrounded by cleared land, which makes them less likely to come this way, and the landlords have a livestock guard dog that warns away anything larger than a chipmunk.
Keep the soil covered, always.
Our soil is hard clay, which supports some grass and a lot of dandelions, sorrel, and wild strawberries. When heavy equipment was run over one section, it became bare hardpan. When heavy rains came, they ran down that hardened section and expanded it by washing out the young plants on the downhill side.
Break no bare sticks in the early-spring forest.
Exciting understory plants like gooseberries and young elderberry shrubs look like nothing more than floppy sticks rising from the forest floor before they leaf out. Respect the floppy sticks.
Plan to be eating wild greens by late April.
Sheep sorrel, dandelion, and some naturalized daylilies are ready to harvest by then. There are also plenty of tree buds, though I need to learn more about their edible uses. Clumps of sedum are also dotted everywhere, but I need to see them bloom before I’ll be confident whether they are the kind of sedum that needs to be cooked or if they can be eaten raw.
Forage at the forest edges.
Dandelions growing in the forest’s dappled shade need to fight for light, so they make bigger tender leaves before flowering, and they need less washing because they hold those leaves up off the ground to maximize how much of their surface area is exposed to the light.
Cut-and-come-again dandelion harvesting is viable.
When I chop dandelion leaves off an inch from the ground, it only takes one week for them to regrow enough for a second harvest.
It’s okay to use dandelions for mulch.
Having full sun isn’t everything I dreamed it would be.
After a lifetime of part shade, I was excited to have sun on my vegetable garden from dawn to nearly dusk. However, when it didn’t rain for most of May and I was planting out seeds and seedlings, I had a miserable time keeping moisture in the soil. I also got sun damage on some seedlings even though they had been well hardened off. It makes sense that permaculture designs incorporate trees and shrubs with lower-growing plants, because even in this cold climate with its short growing season, shade has a role to play.
It doesn’t pay to make assumptions from a distance.
I saw red-stemmed shrubs on the far side of a soggy patch and mentally categorized them as dogwood. When the ground dried and the shrubs leafed out, I took a proper look. Roses! 100 square feet of roses. I had completely failed to note a huge potential source of food (rose hips, petals), tea (buds, petals, leaves), and sheer beauty.
A freshly built hugelkultur mound is great real-estate for bumblebees.
Within a week of my mound’s completion, I met a bumblebee emerging from a freshly dug burrow at its base. The loose soil, the straw mulch covering, and the sunny exposure of the mound all seem to have been attractive features.
Blackberry leaves look different on first-year canes.
Our landlord’s tractor disturbed part of our land in early April, and new clusters of blackberry canes have been sprouting to replace the plants that were snapped off then. It took me several weeks to feel certain that these were indeed blackberries. Instead of being woody, reddish, and covered in big thorns and vaguely triangular clusters of 3 leaflets, they are light green, herbaceous, and only beginning to be covered in soft hairs that I assume will harden into thorns later. The leaves confused me the most: they are circular groupings of five leaflets, something like those on a virginia creeper vine. I had to spend half an hour online comparing my own photos to the descriptions on websites before I finally found a reference to leaves looking different on new growth. I do know they only set fruit on second-year canes, but I had never read before that there were such marked visible differences. I can use this information in the future to help me identify which canes are too young to bear fruit.
Blackberries and raspberries have similar, but not identical, preferences.
I always thought of them growing in the same kinds of distrubed, marginal places. But here it is obvious that the blackberries prefer the open space at the base of the slope where there is lots of sunlight, moisture, and sediment runoff. The raspberries all stick to the edges of the trees.
Even the forest struggles with drought in spring.
Two dry weeks in May before the forest had significant leaf cover were enough to dry out understory plants on the southern sides of slopes.
I’m lucky to have a few acres of field and forest to observe, but you can apply these skills anywhere at all. Go out into your environment and take note of what grows there. What insects visit, and what birds? Learn their names. Notice how patterns of sun and shade affect any plants. Take pictures and make notes. How do the plants look before and after a rainfall? How do things change from day to day? Even if you begin with very little knowledge of the natural world, you will be surprised by how much you come to know just by paying attention.